Evaluation of the usefulness of the provision of shredded paper as bedding in a slatted floored farrowing pen

Extract

Most farrowing pens have slatted floors mainly to achieve labour economy and high standards of hygiene. A major deficiency of such flooring is the difficulty of using bedding to reduce hypothermia of newborn piglets and to protect their delicate tissues from the relative abrasiveness of the floor. Shredded waste paper bedding may have useful applications in such situations because of its texture and cohesiveness, qualities which slow up the rate at which it is voided through the slats relative to other bedding materials. Such paper bedding was evaluated in a controlled experiment.